A clean up crew needs something to clean up that is true, however a healthy clean-up crew will happlily scavenge leftovers from feeding the clowns. Hermits are a nice place to start as the little buggers are nearly universally indistructable. I had a hermit that got trapped in my overflow & lived in there for two months till I finally managed to catch him with a pair of chopsticks. Their only drawback is that all crabs are thugs and act as such. Get a variety of species as they will graze on different things. Snails can be a little more fragile, especially with temp. swings, crabs don't care if you pour gas in the tank. If you are plagued with algae, try an urchin. they are relativly hardy and in my experience one of they few "maintenance" creatures that really do their job. It was a key player in my year long battle against Bryopsis. Your clean-up gang can be just as gorgeous as anything else in the tank too, one of my favorite critters in my whole tank is a spectacular orange striped hermit that easily takes center stage. Many of the critters need to be "topped-up" as they have shorter lifespans, others such as nudi's are totally specialized feeders and simply croak when the food source dries up (or they get sucked into a powerhead & chopped to bits). In my opinion, the creepy crawlies are what make a reef tank a REEF tank. I am a certified Scuba-freak & have been fortunate enough to have dove in many different parts of the world, temperate or tropical, all reefs are loaded with an emmense biodiversity of scavengers & always they make my dives memorable. The same is in my tank, the closer you look, the more creatures you discover that you never noticed before. The fact they ravenously feed on the waste that will kill my tank is just a bonus to me. I've stared in rapture for the last two days at my new Arrow crab as he hunts down bristleworms twice his size! Remember though, that they are but a line of defense however. If your system is not heavily filtered & faithfully maintained it will eventually crash no matter what is crawling on the rocks.
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